To save Undershaw for the Nation by relaunching it as the Conan Doyle Museum and Centre for British and Irish Crime Writing, thus affirming its cultural value and Conan Doyle’s place in the literary heritage of Great Britain and Ireland, and beyond.

Dear Colleagues,

We now have only a little time left before the High Court hearing (23rd May) to rally support for saving Undershaw as a Conan Doyle Museum / Centre for British & Irish Crime Writing, establishing and furthering the cultural and social value of the house.

UNDERSHAW & CONAN DOYLE

Undershaw was built to Conan Doyle’s own designs in 1897, one of the very few writers’ houses with this input. During the ten years that he lived there he wrote many of his most popular stories including fourteen Sherlock Holmes adventures, and ten Brigadier Gerard tales. This has recently been documented by Alistair Duncan in his An Entirely New Country – Arthur Conan Doyle, Undershaw and the Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes (MX Publishing 2011). When Conan Doyle sold Undershaw in 1927 it became an hotel. This closed its doors in 2004 and the property was sold to a development company, Fosseway Ltd.

Now Undershaw may be turned into maisonettes, its gardens built over. Planning permission for this was granted by Waverley Borough Council, a decision which should be overturned at judicial review at the High Court in London on 23rd May 2012. But what better or more appropriate place could there be for a Conan Doyle Museum and Centre for British and Irish Crime Writing, thus affirming its cultural value and Conan Doyle’s place in the literary heritage of Great Britain and Ireland, and beyond, open and accessible to the public all year round (including school visits), with a library, conference facilities, crime writing courses and a writer in residence?

THE UNDERSHAW ALLIANCE

Many heritage houses have been lost, but many more have been saved: why should Undershaw not be one of them? To campaign for its conservation as a Conan Doyle Museum and Centre for British and Irish Crime Writing, two supporters’ groups have been set up, Academics for Undershaw and Crime Writers for Undershaw , the first as a body of authoritative opinion affirming the cultural value of Undershaw, the second honouring Conan Doyle’s place as an ancestor of to-day’s detective fiction. These two groups form the UNDERSHAW ALLIANCE, more than 500 strong, and working to enlist opinion formers and professionals.

The Undershaw Alliance believes that Undershaw can and must be saved for the nation, for the enjoyment of the nation: indeed, in the context of cultural tourism, of all the nations. Our task now is to appeal to a broader public and enlist greater international public support for this.

Media are time machines. They remember and forget. Media screen and record parts of memory and history as well as they maintain collective memories and contribute to historical narratives by (re)shaping events, happenings or other incidents. Media also tend to remind their own past by re-using archive-images in the present, for example. In this sense, media seem to be nostalgic of the past as well as of their own one. Nostalgiaas a concept, feeling or expression is not new. The notion has been introduced by a doctor in Switzerland (17th century) to describe the phenomenon of homesickness. Related to nostalgia is also the idea of melancholia or yearning. These days, there seems to be a BOOM of nostalgia: The Artist (revival of the silent film) or television series like Mad Men – exploring aesthetics and social life of the sixties – are examples of what we could name nostalgic media (makers). Digital photography on cell phones gets a polaroid-touch; the retro design becomes digitized. Advertising for watches or cars is linked to nostalgic forms of family tradition. Fans of the fifties organise parties and fashion events to feel like being part of the past in the present. Being nostalgic and remembering pieces of the past also includes forgetting. What kind of memories are discriminated? Can media really be nostalgic? Which specific forms of nostalgia appear in contemporary society and why? Can people be nostalgic if they did not experience the past they pretend being nostalgic of? What kind of politics of nostalgia exist? What is the impact of nostalgia on the media market and its influence on economy? Finally, given the arbitrary (?) use of the past in all its imaginable variations and cultural systems, is it still possible to use the wordnostalgia or should there be a neologism describing the transformation of the past in(to) the digital era? Could it even be possible to be simply nostalgic of nostalgia; finally describing the eternal research for (lost) identity?

This international conference aims to explore nostalgia as a (mass) media phenomena and also seeks forcontributions that treat any other mediated forms of nostalgia.

Participants will have to cover their own travel and accommodation expenses. Travel information as well as a list of affordable hotels and other accommodations will be posted on the conference-website in June.

Participation fees will be announced but will not exceed 100 CHF (and less for students).

This one-day Symposium on Japanese popular media investigates the significance of contemporary Japanese media to the wider industries and cultures that they serve. Although access to Japanese media cultures has never been better for those living outside Japan, there remains a dearth of analytical engagement with how the Japanese media industries function, and only patchy coverage exists of the media texts produced within Japan. Therefore, this Symposium seeks to unpack some of the complexities within the Japanese media landscape, by considering how differing media industries work in collaboration as well as in competition with one another. In doings so, the aim is to bring together speakers utilising a wide range of approaches and specialist knowledge to discuss the interconnectivity of Japan’s media industries, visible in phenomena such as cross-media adaptations, franchising practices, remakes of texts and international distribution. We also aim to complicate the notion of Japanese media industries as “national” by investigating the regional, transnational and global reach of their texts.

We seek papers examining how Japanese media, including (but not limited to) manga, anime, video games, television, magazine publishing and film operate within and beyond Japanese borders. The aim is to bring together experts able to discuss how Japanese media products get made, and why, who gets to see them (legally or otherwise) and what it is that academic explorations of Japan’s media might be able to offer the industries and cultures they study.

Leisure! Enjoyment! Fun!

INCS 2013 Conference, University of Virginia

March 14-17, 2013

full name / name of organization:

Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies

contact email:

ksc3j@virginia.edu

“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” It was the age of pleasure. It was the age of atonement. It was any place in the nineteenth century. The scope is global, the approaches, cross-disciplinary. What pleased the palate and tickled the nose? What roused the senses and deepened joy? What thrilled the body and inspired the mind? What did they do besides work? What diversions (respectable or otherwise) did they seek? How did they think about the enjoyments they sought? These are some of the questions to address at INCS 2013, which is devoted to ‘Leisure, Enjoyment, and Fun.’

Consider all forms of enjoyment desired, sought, anticipated, or suppressed. Of course what constitutes enjoyment was widely contested ‘then’ as it is ‘now,’ and just what the relation between enjoyment and happiness is has never been clear. The task we set ourselves this year is an examination of various pleasures, thoughts about fun and leisure, expressions or reports of enjoyment, and what these experiences tell us about the nineteenth century. Definitions of enjoyment are themselves numerous and contrasting, and we will keep the field broad so as to draw a wide catch. Enjoyment may be associated with entertainment, amusement, comfort, satisfaction, happiness, absence of pain, etc. We are interested in how enjoyment is experienced, what function it serves, how it can be legislated or monitored, if it can be exhausted, repeated, repelled, and whether individual enjoyment differs from enjoyment shared.

Abstracts are now being accepted for possible inclusion in an anthology on “The Adventures of Tintin.” Proposed essay topics should creatively engage with the critical, philosophical, and social issues explored in the Tintin universe and intended to appeal to the intelligent lay reader.